Below is the OCR text representation for this newspapers page.

PAGE 5—August 5, 1971 *Vietvi4m ‘TERRORISM N. VIETNAM POUCT Bishop Claims Public Misinformed On War IN SOUTH VIETNAM Catholics Said Divided On War By A1 Antczak LOS ANGELES (NC) — An American missionary bishop who has spent the past 25 years in Thailand said here he doesn’t think the public is being properly informed about the Vietnam war. Redemptorist Bishop Clarence Duhart wondered aloud, for example, whether people believe most atrocities are committed by the co m m u n i sts or the Americans. “If Lt. Calley was guilty, there is no justification for what he did,” Bishop Duhart stated. Furthermore, if what Calley did had the endorsement of his superior officers, they should be punished too, the bishop said. “But I don’t think anyone is saying that the Calley situation was a result of U.S. policy. “But terrorism is a matter of policy of the North Vietnam regime.” Thousands of Vietnamese political leaders have been killed because they would not cooperate with the North Vietnamese government, the bishop claimed. “The Hue massacre was reported one day and then buried in footnotes,” he continued, whereas the Calley case has been on the front pages for months. “I don’t think the picture is being properly given and I think the conclusions which come from it are wrong,” he said. Bishop Duhart was visiting Los Angeles as part of an archdiocesan “missionary cooperative plan” where bishops serving in foreign countries preach at various local parishes seeking funds for their work. A special project in Bishop Duhart’s diocese of Udothani, Thailand, is an “infantorium” which provides homes for needy Thai babies. The bishop said he doesn’t have much confidence in the conclusions drawn by Americans who spend a week or two in Vietnam and who, through interpreters, gather a superficial knowledge of what is going on there. Bishop Duhart himself has Vatican Says Probe Seeks 6 Clarification’ VATICAN CITY (NC) - The Vatican views its present examination of Father Hans Kung’s books on infallibility and the Church ‘not so much as an attack but as a necessary part of the constant dialectic that is aimed at clarifying issues.” A statement from the Doctrinal Congregation, which is dealing with the controversial theologian’s books at Pope Paul Vi’s express request, said that such a view should be prompted by “a sense of fair play and of respect toward the community of the faithful.” Fr. Kung, professor of dogma at the University of Tuebingen in Germany, announced July 21 that the orthodoxy of his book on infallibility had come under investigation. He said his earlier work on the Church “has for some time now been the object of a similar doctrinal investigation.” not spent much time in Vietnam, but there are large numbers of Vietnamese refugees in Udonthani. The refugees came while the French were still in Indochina. And they came in such numbers that Bishop Duhart felt an obligation to learn their language. Catholic refugees near Udonthani are in sufficient numbers generally to defy Hanoi, the bishop said, but not all of them get away with it. The communist infiltrate the refugee communities, he claimed, exacting reprisals on those who dare defy Hanoi’s wishes. Anti-communist refugees “are labeled traitors and it is made difficult for them to live within their own communities. And there are physical reprisals, too,” the Redemptorist Bishop stated. Where they are able to do so, the communists organize towns along party lines. “They take taxes in a town where I am and send the money to Hanoi. They operate a government within a government. Catholics in the refugee community are often fearful of visits from the Legion of Mary because of the consequences should word of it get around, he said. Bishop Duhart told of an instance of an elderly woman who was dying and who wanted to be received into the Church. The bishop offered to go and instruct her, but was urged to stay away. She was instructed instead by lay catechists. The bishop later visited her at night, found her well prepared and gave her the sacraments just before she died. “I wonder how many people really know what it means to be completely controlled,” the bishop observed. “They don’t dare turn on a radio except for the broadcasts from Hanoi.” Bishop Duhart is anything but optimistic about current U.S. troop withdrawal plans. “It’s like a poker play, but there’s no bluffing,” he said. “They don’t tell us anything. We tell them everything. PARIS (NC) — Catholics in South Vietnam, long regarded as staunch supporters of resistance to communism, are now divided in their attitudes toward the war, a Catholic former member of the South Vietnamese National Assembly said in a French Catholic magazine, Informations Catholiques Internationales. Nguyen Van Can, the former assembly member, has also been a philosophy professor and is now the director of a Vietnamese study group set up in Paris. He said that in South Vietnam today there are Catholics who absolutely reject war in any circumstances, even a defensive war; there are those who accept the idea of a defensive war. Among those absolutely opposed to war, he said, are a group of young intellectuals and some professors at Saigon University, including Professors Nguyen Van Trung and Ly Chanh Trung, as well- as Father Nguyen Ngoc Lan. The group published Song Dao (To Live Religion). AT CATHOLIC PEACE GROUP MEET North Viet Priests Give Their Views By Ernest Ostro PARIS (NC) — A picture of a flourishing Catholic Church in North Vietnam, not one of a “Church of Silence,” emerged at a meeting of Catholic peace groups in Paris last May. Two North Vietnamese priests came from Hanoi for the International Assembly of Christians in Solidarity with the Vietnamese, Laotian and Cambodian People, to report on the state of the Church under the North Vietnamese regime. The two priests are Fathers Ho Thanh Bien and Nguyen The Vinh. The assembly and the priests were all solidly against U.S. involvement in Indochina and for immediate U.S. 'withdrawal. They supported virtually without reservation the positions of the Viet Cong and North Vietnamese delegations to the Paris peace talks. Here is the view of the Catholic Church in North Vietnam that emerged from the priests’ reports: After the Geneva Accords of 1954, 700,000 of the 1.5 million Catholics living in North Vietnam moved to the South, where they received favored treatment under the Catholic regime of the late President Ngo Dinh Diem, himself a Catholic. Most of the Catholics who left the North had lived in a 11-Catholic villages. They followed their local clergy to the South in self-contained groups, fearing massacres and persecution if they remained. However, the 800,000 Catholics remaining in the North were not massacred. They are still free to practice their religion without harassment under the constitution of the Democratic Republic of Vietnam (DRV), the priests said. Christmas is a national holiday, as is the anniversary of the birth of Buddha. The only serious interference with Catholicism in North Vietnam has come from destruction of churches by U.S. bombing, they noted. Father Bien reported that 475 churches have been seriously damaged or destroyed by U.S. action, and many Catholics, including Bishop Tran Dinh Nhien of Vinh, have been killed. The number of Catholics in North Vietnam has now grown to about 1.2 million, divided into 10 dioceses governed, until Bishop Nhien was killed in 1968, by 13 bishops. Of the 318 priests who stayed, several have died either of old age or during air raids. At present the recruiting of priests is the most worrisome problem, because old priests are dying without being replaced. All the seminaries were evacuated except those in Vinh, which functioned almost normally until they were destroyed by American bombs in 1968, the priests said. But material destruction has only strengthened the resolve of North Vietnamese Catholics, they added. “Living in a state of war,” said Father Bien, “all the DRV Catholics developed a Firmer solidarity with our compatriots, and while preserving our lives and the spiritual life of the Church, we organized prayers and Masses with the greatest care and fought against the offensives of the invaders’ jets and warships, and we carried out all these things with efficiency . . ..Everywhere Catholics were calm and courageous. “Rice and sweet potatoes grow over the places which still bear the marks of bombardments; even the churches have trenches of communication, and as the churches were damaged, prayers and Masses take place in underground shelters . .. .As the U.S. government has invaded our country, destroyed our people and religion, then our duty to Fight them and save our country means also saving our religion.” The attitude of the North Vietnamese government toward Catholicism has been formed by the historic role of the Church in Vietnam, the priests said. The Church was a vehicle for colonizing, First for the French and later for the Americans, through which a small minority was detached from the main body of Vietnamese society to rule the country in line with Western interests. The Church, and especially the Church hierarchy, beneFited materially from a privileged position under the French, and some Catholic clergy claiming to be nationalists sided with the French in denouncing the Viet Minh as “atheistic communists.” Thus at the end of the war of liberation from France the Catholic Church in North Vietnam was not only a religious institution, but the strongest center of political opposition to the new regime, the priests said. The policy of the DRV government has been to insist strongly on the distinction between religious and political activity - protecting and respecting the religious role of the Church while banning any interference by it in the socialist evolution of the country, they added. The leaders of the DRV have expressed the view that religious believers of any faith are first of all persons concerned with morality and social justice, they said. A ccordingly, said Xuan Thuy, chief of the delegation of the DRV to the Paris talks on r Vietnam, many North Vietnamese Catholics who were originally opposed to the socialist regime have come to recognize that socialism has raised the moral standards of the country by removing the causes of such social ills as theft and prostitution and by improving the position of women in the home and in society. Those who accept the idea of a defensive war, Can said, are much more numerous and maintain that North Vietnam started the present war. “But even these Catholics,” he said, “are not pro-war. They are in reality obliged and even condemned to defend themselves. “Most of them, moreover, are refugees from North Vietnam who experienced the communist regime and are hanuted by the fear of seeing it set up in the South. They wonder, with anguish, where they could go if communism were implanted in South Vietnam also. Peace, for them, could not be submission to a political regime they regard as enslavement. “But it is not only refugees from the North who accept the notion of a defensive war. Some among whom they live share their views, and, furthermore, the operations of the North Vietnamese and the Vietcong have made many Catholics understand the attitude of the refugees.” The holders of the two d ifferent attitudes toward war do not understand each other, Can said. “The majority group considers the ‘paciFists’ as irresponsible or even as persons overcome by North Vietnam. In short, as traitors to their co-religionists. On the other hand, the small group opposed to all war sees the majority of Catholics as holding an outmoded position, incompatible with the necessary evolution of things,” he said. Can went on to say that as the war continues “a growing number of Catholics understand that a military victory for either side has become impossible. An indeFinite pursuit of armed conflict would signify the disappearance of Vietnam. Both reason and charity therefore require the cessation of hostilities. From that realization, like it or not, comes the necessity of .admitting a future coexistence with the communists.” Many Catholics, Can said, understand this necessity and are preparing to accept it, but the question remains: What form is the coexistence to take? Some Catholics, Can said, consider it acceptable to have the communists participate in a democratic South Vietnam as a political party submitting to the will of the people. But many others, he said, still do not accept this idea. The bishops of South Vietnam are keeping quiet, taking the attitude that temporal matters are not their concern, Can said. He said they have taken this position because priests and laity in areas controlled by the North Vietnamese and Vietcong would be subject to reprisals if the bishops took a stand against the Vietcong, and, if they consented to coexistence with the communists, many Catholics would accuse them of inconsistency, and regard them as “false shepherds.” Accepting the notion of coexistence, Can said, would also complicate the bishops’ relations with the present government of South Vietnam, which is resolved to continue the war, and has refused, in all public statements, to admit coexistence with the communists, even as a political party in a democratic system. MERCY CARGO - Msgr. Andrew P. Landi of Catholic Relief Services (left) discusses mercy cargo for East Pakistani refugees with Dave Brubeck, noted jazz composer and pianist, who represented Americans for Children’s Relief, during loading of 30 tons of shelter materials, baby foods and medicines at JFK International Airport, New York City, July 19. Cargo valued at $220,000 was being flown to Calcutta on a special, jointly chartered plane by the American Catholic overseas aid agency and Americans for Children’s Relief. ACR is conducting a nationwide campaign to raise funds to support the work of Church relief agencies among the six million East Pakistani refugees who have fled their homeland into India. (NC PHOTO) PAX ROMAN A MEETING Archbishop Camara Asks Rich Countries To Change By Ann Gregory FRIBOURG, Switzerland (NC) — “Changing political, economic and social structures in poor countries call for change in the countries of abundance,” said Archbishop Helder Camara of Olinda and Recife, Brazil, in a plea for peaceful revolution. Such a revolution, he said, should begin with moral pressure to liberate education. The Brazilian archbishop received an honorary doctorate from Switzerland’s Catholic University of Fribourg, where he addressed, the 50th anniversary ceremonies of Pax Romana, the international movement of Catholic students and intellectuals. Archbishop Camara spared no one in his analysis of the need for change. “Those in power remain obstinately fearful of the people. Everyone mistrusts everyone,” he said. Dictatorships of the left and right show a strange resemblance, the archbishop said, and oppression also exists in the democracies, subtle though it may be. Where are the freedoms of domocracy, he asked. As for the “free” press, he said, “its freedom stops where the interests of business intervene.” Religion, said Archbishop Camara, “is used to maintain a stable situation. If the Church poses problems in terms of justice, she is invited to silence.” And the universities--“they belong to governments which have interests ....” “Only the rich and the powerful are, in appearance, free,” he said. But the archbishop maintained that, behind this facade of apparent freedom, “they are really the slaves of their own egoism.” The archbishop deplored the dictatorships’ view that liberating education is ‘‘subversion and communism.” In the democracies, on the other hand, he said, there are pressures and compromises. A truly liberating education is “to progressive, too daring, in too much of a hurry” for them. There is a way out, however, Archbishop Camara said, because “that education has an ally: a liberating moral pressure. That is, a pressure capable of peacefully attaining the overthrow of the structures of slavery.” To those who ask why he wants to change the structures of the developed countries, structures which have brought them prosperity, Archbishop Camara replied that the price they have paid is too high. “Why not attain the same thing without using neo-colonialism? For the effects of this colonialism, for the Third World, are terrible.” In order for education to liberate man, education must be liberated by moral pressure, he said. “This growing moral pressure is everywhere about to burst out. The Abrahamic minorities exist already. And they are marked by the sign of God.” Archbishop Camara calls them“ Abrahamic” because, like the Old Testament patriarch Abraham, they are “called upon to hope against all hope.” The archbishop’s preaching of peaceful revolution was warmly received in Fribourg where it was proposed that he be made a candidate for the Nobel Peace Prize. The Swiss government, however, warned Archbishop Camara that he had violated a decree prohibiting foreigners from publicly speaking on domestic Swiss policies. If the controversial archbishop continues to criticize Switzerland, they warned, he could be subject to prosecution. During a speech in Zurich, Archbishop Camara had called on the Swiss to modify their economic, cultural, and social structures. He specifically criticized the Swiss banks for holding the currency of rich people from poor countries. “Do you know that money is the sweat and the tears and the blood of masses of people in underdeveloped countries who have been reduced to subhuman living conditions by your respectable and honorable clients?” he asked bankers. || - - * * ■ I Know Your Faith The ‘KNOW YOUR FAITH’ SERIES is on a short vacation. The 1971-72 SERIES is scheduled to begin with the issue of September 23.